RandBall: Santana shows the downside of Twitter

Yogi Berra-isms are amusing and plentiful, but many of them contain nuggets of truth buried in juxtaposed words or bad math. One of his best musings on baseball goes like this: "Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical." It's fraught with impossible numbers, but the point rings true: baseball is a game played on the field, but so much of it is played inside the head.

It sure sounds like the mental part of the game is eating away at recently demoted Twins shortstop Danny Santana — and that Twitter is not helping one bit.

"He sees people talking about him on Twitter, in Spanish, in English, telling him he's playing bad," fellow shortstop Eduardo Escobar said earlier this week. "It's hard to play in the majors, and he was reading things that were hurting him."

He doesn't have to read the tweets, and he (likely) will develop a thicker skin as time goes on — learning to ignore the over-the-top hate.

But in a sport where 90 percent of the game is mental and half is physical, you can have all the athletic gifts in the world. Until you get your head right, it doesn't matter.

RandBall: startribune.com/randball